


Room 919

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Car Accidents, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Hospitals, disabled roland deschain, i love thwm so much, im SO OFFED on medicine rn i have no idea if this is good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27868229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: Their dinh was never meant to wear a hospital gown.
Relationships: Eddie Dean/Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers & Eddie Dean & Susannah Dean & Roland Deschain & Oy, Jake Chambers & Roland Deschain
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Room 919

**Author's Note:**

> like it says in the tags i am VERY off it currently..... got medicine in my system n shit and all that u know. don't ask me about the setting, i don't remember what i was thinking when i wrote this. enjoy!!

"That's my dinh!  _That's my dinh, you son of a bitch!_ Don't you put that fuckin—"

Eddie's cries were cut short by a well-aimed punch to the arm from Jake. The kid made sure he had Eddie's attention, then shook his head solemnly.  _It's no good._ These words, projected into his head on a wave of khef, echoed in Eddie's thoughts for a long time.  _It's no good._ Roland was about to get drugged up and examined and  it's no good  to yell at the doctors to make them stop.  _It's no good._

Eddie knew this hospital; he'd been here about a million times in the winter of '79, back when Henry had briefly joined his high school's wrestling team. He'd been a pretty crappy wrestler, if Eddie did say so, but their mom had been so goddamn  excited that Henry'd been doing anything besides 'watching out' for Eddie (or picking his nose, or pressure-washing the bathroom floor in the wee hours, or stealing porno mags that only would've cost a buck or two from the bodega up the street). Mamma Dean had paid for Henry's shitload of hospital visits during that wrestling season happily enough, and she'd always insisted on bringing Eddie along for reasons he wasn't quite sure of. 

Suffice it to say that Eddie knew these key-lime corridors and thick-paneled windows quite well. They hadn't changed a bit between the winter of '79 and the summer of '99, set his watch and warrant on it. 

When it had been Henry going off to get tested, Eddie hadn't really given a shit, to be perfectly honest. He'd either be alright or he'd have to take some aspirin for a few days and prevent any hard surfaces from making contact with his noggin. Nothing had ever really been at stake with Henry's hospital visits. He could always quit wrestling if he got bonked on the head one time too many. 

With Roland in the hospital,  _everything_ was at stake, and the three New Yorkers knew it. The most advanced medicine the gunslinger had ever been exposed to was just some fucking  _Keflex,_ for god's sake! What if he turned out to be allergic to latex and died of anal-whatsit shock before the doctors even tried to treat him?

"Eddie," Jake said, speaking out loud this time, "Can you stop thinking about that?" Eddie resurfaced from his thoughts to find that the four of them (Oy curled up at Susannah's side, doing his best to mimic a service dog) were sitting on hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. Jake was rubbing his forehead just below his hairline and blinking rapidly, like he was fighting off tears. Eddie realized that the kid had been picking up on his fatalistic fantasies. He wished there was some kind of mute button for telepathy. 

"Sorry," he said quietly, no longer yelling as he'd done in the entrance to the building.  _It's not worth it._

"I don't think he's allergic to anything," Jake said after a while. He was talking about Eddie's fear of Roland going into anaphylactic shock. When Susannah gave him a questioning look, Jake just shrugged and explained, "Eddie was worried about that."

"I think the medicine'll be allergic to Roland, not the other way around," Eddie tried to joke, but his heart wasn't in it. That didn't stop him from trying again, though. "If he's allergic to anything, it'd be that truck that hit him."

The look that Suze fired in his direction was warning enough; it was time to knock it off. Eddie swallowed another halfhearted attempt—something about the speed limit on the path of the Beam—and settled into his uncomfortable plastic chair, holding his wife's hand. 

_It's no good._ Eddie couldn't stop thinking about the hard  _crunch_ he'd heard as the truck's front bumper made contact with Roland's side; the screech as that fucking idiot driver slammed on the brakes; the low moan that had come from the gunslinger as he'd lain there in the road. To Eddie, that moan had seemed like the most beautiful sound in the world; better, even, than the music of the rose. It meant Roland was alive, he hadn't passed into the clearing, he was _alive_ and still conscious and breathing—

"Eddie." Jake's voice was harder, now. "Can you st—"

Eddie couldn't stop himself from blurting out, "Can  _you_ keep your fucking brain-poking to yourself?" Susannah squeezed his hand, another warning, but his mouth had already gotten ahead of his brain and Eddie steamrolled on, cutting Jake's protests off. "I can go get some fucking tinfoil and wear it like a hat, would that help? Oh, how about—"

"I get it!" Jake exclaimed. "I get it, okay?" If he'd had a gun, Eddie would have been looking for an opportunity to take it from him before things got too heated. Instead, he tried to swallow the smart-alec remarks he had waiting on deck, and held a placating hand out. 

"Sorry. I'm just on edge, is all," Eddie apologized, even though his heart wasn't in it. Jake knew this, and accepted his apology with a wordless grunt anyway. Susannah relaxed her vice grip on Eddie's hand and smiled briefly at him before she went back to staring at the door that the doctors had taken Roland through. 

She was waiting for something, though she probably couldn't have articulated exactly what. None of them could, though if hard-pressed Eddie might have been able to come close. Susannah only knew that until right now, the most advanced medical care Roland had ever received amounted to a handful of antibiotics and a few stitches. He was in no way prepared for those doctors to begin manhandling him around a small hospital room, poking him with strange tools and asking him questions he wouldn't know the answer to. 

_Oh lord, if they ask him to read an eye chart..._

Susannah didn't let that thought finish (Jake silently thanked her, although he had a little more faith in Roland's ability to read individual letters). If and when Roland was awake and coherent enough for the doctors to ask him those questions, he'd surely be able to call the rest of the ka-tet into the room to answer for him. Eddie would probably have to do it; he looked the most capable out of all of them, and his when was closest to '99. 

They'd all just have to wait. That was less than ideal, but there were no other options this simple. 

-

Jake knew the nurse would mispronounce Roland's surname before the man ever opened his mouth. "Deez-chain? Family of Roland Deez-chain?" the man asked the waiting room as a whole, reading from a slip of paper attached to a clipboard. Jake jumped up immediately, pulling Eddie with him. Susannah propelled herself along behind the two of them, with Oy trotting next to her. They approached the nurse—his nametag read  _Schwartz_ _,_ followed by some medical title—who gave the group a tired once-over before he gestured for them to follow him. 

"Your father's awake," said Schwartz as he led the ka-tet through the corridors of the hospital. They looked wider than Eddie remembered, although that could have just been due to the lighter paint job. It still felt like the same place. When no one said anything in reply, Schwartz continued, "He's stable. He's not saying much, though; not sure if that's from pain, or maybe brain damage from the impact or may—"

"He's always like that," Eddie broke in, cutting off the coming list of possible reasons for Roland's close-lippedness. Eddie knew the real reason was simple: the gunslinger didn't trust the doctors. 

Jake nodded in agreement and added, "He doesn't really know that much medical stuff. If you have to ask him anything—"

This time, the nurse interrupted. "Yes, he said that, er, 'Edmund' knows his details." Eddie stifled a snort at the name Edmund and raised his hand. 

"Yeah, that's me," he said, "good ole Edmund Deez-nuts—I mean Deez-chain. How ya doin, Mr. Schwartz?" He stuck out a hand for the nurse to shake. 

Schwartz did not shake Eddie's hand. "Okay, let's get started," he said, as though nothing had happened. He cleared his throat loudly. "Is your father allergic to any medication?"

"Keflex seems to agree with him." Eddie exchanged a meaningful look with Susannah behind the nurse's back after he said that, and smirked as she tried to hold in her laughter. Jake sighed and answered the question instead. 

"We don't know. All he's taken is aspirin and Keflex, really."

"Right... Any other allergies? Nuts, maybe?"

"Seafood," Eddie responded promptly. He was thinking of the lobstrosities on the beach, and that seemingly endless stretch of nights when their meat had been the only edible substance for miles around. "It runs in the family," he added with a shudder. If he never saw a crustacean again, it would be perfectly all right with him. 

Schwartz filled out the gaps in Roland's medical chart as the little group made their way through the hospital towards the gunslinger's room. By the time they reached the door numbered 919 (to absolutely no one's surprise) the paper was more or less complete. Schwartz waved the Deez-chains inside and left to deal with something else. 

"Guy's bedside manner leaves something to be desired," Eddie commented. The other two ignored him.

"Roland!" Susannah exclaimed, rolling her chair up to his metal hospital bed. The gunslinger nodded at her and waved with his left hand, but said nothing. Jake and Eddie greeted him in turn, and Oy echoed Jake's words in his deep footballer's voice. 

Roland's gaze softened at last when he looked at Jake. The boy hung back at first, not wanting to approach just yet. After Eddie had leaned down to give Roland a hug (which the gunslinger begrudgingly accepted, since he couldn't exactly move out of the way), Jake stepped forth. Susannah and Eddie automatically made room for the kid in the small cluster they'd formed around one side of the bed. 

Jake took Roland's right hand, the one with an IV pipe hanging off of it. No doubt he'd torn the strange tubing out when he'd come to. Jake's small hands shook slightly as he held the gunslinger's callused fingers, skimming over the missing first two. The boy stared at this hand, so alive in his grasp, as if to remind himself that the man attached to it was still alive, still breathing. 

Eddie and Susannah had both been so worried about something going wrong, and their combined worry had seeped into Jake's own thoughts like frigid, muddy water into a leaky boot. Well, Susannah's husband had been considerably more imaginative than the woman herself, but quite a few of her own morbid hypotheticals had made their way into Jake's mind back in the waiting room. 

None of that mattered now. Roland was alive and Jake was holding the proof right there in his hands. He just wished the gunslinger would  _say_ something, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this wasn't some clever glammer or wishful dream. Even a gesture from the tet's rudimentary sign language would have been more than good enough. Instead, he just lay there, fully awake and staring Jake straight in the eyes without saying a word. 

"How do you feel?" Jake tried, hoping to get a direct response to a direct question.Roland pulled his hand free of Jake's grasp and gestured to himself, laying on a flimsy metal bed without his guns, wearing a paper-thin hospital gown. He'd somehow convinced the hospital staff to let him keep his cotton underdrawers on underneath, but that was it. Everything else (mayhap including his voice) was sealed away in a plastic bag, resting on the floor under the room's tiny window. 

That gesture, indicating the gown, the injuries, and the lack of guns told Jake all he needed to know. Roland wasn't doing so hot, and no wonder; an impact like that would've done some pretty painful damage. Eddie and Susannah had gotten the message too, though Eddie understood a little less clearly than the other two. After all, he was now the only one who had never been struck by a moving vehicle. 

His next comment made this even more obvious. "We gotta get outta here," he said, glancing around the room with a determined look in his eyes. "Never know who mighta seen us come in." Eddie walked over to the door and stuck his head out into the hallway, clearly looking for something. His eyes widened and he shot out of the room before Susannah got the chance to argue against his plan. They shouldn't have been trying to move Roland this soon, not before the hospital found out if anything serious was wrong with him...

She and Jake shared a sigh, then winced in tandem as Roland coughed out an accompanying exhale. The ghost of a pained grimace appeared on his face for a moment, but he quickly schooled his features when Eddie came back in the room pushing a wheelchair ahead of him. It was compact, like the one Susannah had taken from the train station in Kansas, but its back was high and the wheels were much smaller. It would be hard for anyone to push themself along in that; somebody else would have to do it using the handles. 

Roland eyed the chair with a look of distrust on his face. He pointed emphatically to his legs and sat up in the bed, wordlessly arguing that he was perfectly capable of walking out of the hospital on his own. When he tried to stand up, Jake gently pushed him back down and said, "Wait a sec. Eddie, don't you think he should put his clothes back on first?"

Eddie nodded. "Yeah, better not flash our friend Schwartz on the way down," he agreed, earning himself a light smack on the arm from Susannah. Jake rolled his eyes at Eddie's back as the man stepped back into the hallway and closed the door behind him. The three still in the room heard him whistling the rice song while he stood watch, prepared to intercept any medical personnel who tried to enter the hospital room. Susannah and Jake turned around to give Roland some privacy while he changed. They pretended not to hear his quiet grunts of pain as he fumbled his way into the clothing. 

When he'd finished, Roland cleared his throat roughly and tapped Susannah on the shoulder. She turned back to face him with a smile; he looked more like himself, now. Their dinh was never meant to wear a hospital gown. Jake was smiling too, though worry still tainted his expression. 

Thoughts of low men disguised as doctors and janitors and nurses and every other position imaginable filled his mind like Tetris blocks, stacking on top of one another until there were only small spaces for anything else.  At least I can keep my thoughts to myself, Jake's inner monologue consoled him.  Besides, they've probably already thought of that. 

Susannah certainly had thought of it, given how frequently she dreamed of a strange, hospital-like room and a doctor with his face stitched on, clutching a chart with furry little paws. It didn't take a genuis to figure out that the can-toi might be here. Eddie, however, was occupied with the question of getting the four (five) of them out of the building and back to someplace safe, like the rose, as painlessly as possible. The issue of the low men blended in with that of the logistics of taking two wheelchairs in an elevator at the same time, along with a thousand other small details that passed through his mind and were just as quickly dismissed or filed away for later use. 

Oy couldn't smell anything besides plain old human, but that didn't mean they weren't hiding out somewhere around here. 

Roland, on the other hand, was only concentrating on standing upright. Maybe Eddie had the right idea with the chair, but he'd be damned if he wouldn't walk out of this place on his own two feet...

He stumbled, and Jake's hands shot out to steady him. The lack of balance wasn't a direct result of the injuries; at least, it didn't feel like that to Roland. He thought it more likely stemmed from the drugs that the nurse had told him about, the ones that had come through the strange tube into the veins of his right hand. It would wear off, but when?

"Roland, I really think you should—" Susannah began to suggest that the gunslinger made use of the wheelchair that Eddie had so helpfully located, but before she could complete her sentence, the door burst open. 

The sound of Eddie's raised voice hit her first, along with Schwartz the nurse's own dulcet tones. Her husband's Brooklyn accent was in full force, nasalizing his words sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility as he shook his fist at the nurse, who squared his shoulders in response and thrust his little clipboard into Eddie's chest with a heavily accented remark of his own. 

Susannah watched this play out in the doorway before she remembered Roland, who stood there swaying like a car wash inflatable man waving in the wind. She made brief eye contact with Jake, who grasped her meaning immediately and brought the second wheelchair over for Roland to sit down in. They both knew that he didn't want to go back to that hospital cot. 

Once he could see straight, Roland reached for the knife in his gunna and took it out of the bag. Gripping it tightly in his left hand, he rolled the chair forward using his feet to inch along the floor towards the two arguing men. It was slow going, and neither  seemed to notice him, though he knew that Eddie would have heard his feet tapping on the strange false wood of the floor. 

Despite being half a foot shorter than Schwartz, Eddie was doing a good job intimidating the man. Roland was proud. Eddie was also drawing the fight out and baiting his opponent for sport, which Roland did not approve of. Though, he supposed that the man could have one easy fight before the battles that lay ahead. 

Once Roland was within arm's reach of Schwartz, he cleared his throat once more. The nurse's entire body tensed briefly as he became aware of the gunslinger's presence. Eddie nodded respectfully at his dinh and cocked his head inquisitively in the other man's direction, silently asking if he should finish up or let Roland have his turn. Roland nodded back and twirled his right hand in a circle.  _Hurry up._

The gunslinger raised the knife and pointed it at Schwartz. Eddie took this as his cue, because the man fell completely silent in the presence of cold steel. 

"Alright, man, it's been fun, but like I said: we're leaving. Now. Nobody's gonna run any tests or any of that shit, ya got me? Capisce?" Schwartz nodded frantically. All that bravado had fled, leaving him just a trembling man with a clipboard. Eddie grinned at him, that hunter's grin that said  _I've got you now._ The nurse practically sprinted down the hall, away from room 919. 

Right on cue, Roland slumped down in the chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Susannah's mouth opened in an O of surprise and worry, and she came over to him and shook his shoulder lightly. She was rewarded with a groan for her efforts. 

"Roland?" asked Jake, in a small voice that almost made him sound his age. The gunslinger shook his head to rid his vision of the drug-induced blur and looked up to find three pairs of clear, alert eyes staring at him. He shook his head once more and cleared his throat again, trying to wake his tongue up. 

In a low, gravelly voice, Roland said, "Let's go." 

He didn't have to tell Eddie twice. The younger man seized the handles of the gunslinger's chair, checked to make sure Roland was seated completely, and followed Jake and Oy out of the room. Susannah brought up the rear, with the rest of Roland's gunna on her lap. 

Roland kept a tight grip on the knife in his left hand, and he marked the location of the Ruger stuffed into Jake's waistband in case he needed to draw it quickly. His head was lighter now, and hallway wasn't hazy like the room had been. But as the fog receded and his mind cleared, the pain increased tenfold. Trying to focus on sitting upright  _and_ holding the knife at the same time was like trying to... It was like trying to sit up and hold a knife at the same time while his entire nervous system screamed at him and the hospital chair (made of the same flimsy metal as the cot) rattled beneath him. It wasn't easy. 

No one tried to stop them from leaving the building, thankfully. Ka was on their side—though it seemed a little late to Roland. By the time they'd reached the ground floor and found a side door to quietly slip out of, Roland felt alert enough to walk on his own—well, on his own with his arm around Eddie's shoulders. They left the wheelchair inside the hospital. Someone would come by and find it, eventually. 

The alley smelled stunk of piss and garbage, and the pavement was so uneven that Eddie and Jake had to lift Susannah's chair over a few deep fissures in the asphalt, but it was still worlds better than staying inside that hospital. Guns and their respective slingers had no place inside that building. 

Now that they were outside, they could feel the rose again; all of them, Rolandjakesusannaheddie(oy), smiled in unison as the faint snatches of song entered their minds once more. They exited the alley and began walking towards the song; towards the rose; towards the Tower. 

**Author's Note:**

> thankee for reading!! comments/kudos make my day


End file.
